


Heirloom Varieties

by slipstream



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Apples, Food as a Metaphor for Love, M/M, Other, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-24
Updated: 2020-04-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:15:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23822941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slipstream/pseuds/slipstream
Summary: Crowley's not the one who thinks to call them Red Delicious.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12





	Heirloom Varieties

Crowley’s not the one who thinks to call them  
Red Delicious.

He takes the credit, of course, bland as it is,  
mealy and full of starch.

There are quotas to meet, small atonements to sin for,  
a century-long stretch of slumbered silence to fill.

The apples in the market stall feel like a mockery,  
tall, sharply-shouldered reminders

that the humans are, have been, will be  
so much better than any of them at Original Sin.

When he laid down, you could cup an apple  
in the palm of one hand, could tuck its sweet,

hard-muscled curves in your pocket like a stone.  
“Famine’s work, d’you think?” he asks,

watching rapt as Aziraphale’s pink mouth  
puckers in disappointment.

He does not look at the wound his teeth have rent  
in the shining flesh, the white moon circle

in a sky of dappled midnight red. Crowley  
has never been to Iowa, never seen

its fields, far-stretching, golden-stalked,  
breaking like the ocean against a shore of gnarled orchards.

The plump throat contracts, swallows.  
Crowley does not blink. (Once,

they rode abreast twenty miles to San Gimignano.   
A danger, plodding along in the open like that,

Crowley fighting each step to keep the reins of his onyx stallion,  
Aziraphale complaining but steering his pony easily with his thighs.

The sun had sweltered overhead, made a flaming sword  
of Aziraphale’s dagger

as he cut silver slivers from a blush-ripe fruit.  
“Come here and have a taste,” he’d said,

arm outstretched, secret eyes winking black, black  
as the cyanide seeds of his core.

Crowley had burned. Blamed the sun. Spent months  
chasing the ghost of that sweetness with his tongue.)

“It seems his sort of joke. Something beautiful to behold  
but empty at its soul.” Aziraphale sighs

like the wind at the edge of a high cliff.  
“Progress,” he says, “has always confounded me.”

He offers up the Apple. Crowley leans in for a bite.  
The flavor, he finds, is all the sweeter second-hand.


End file.
